For this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Systems Manager Michelle takes us on a nostalgia trip into the world of hot rods and car shows!

Every year in the middle of summer, my dad, sister, and I would stock my dad’s ’39 Chevy with all the supplies we would need to make the pilgrimage to the National Street Rod Association’s Street Rod Nationals. Street Rod Nationals is the yearly car show for hobbyists to display their vehicles manufactured before 1960, from the Model T to the 1957 Chevy Bel Air. Most entries have been modified in some way, but you will see finished masterpieces parked next to work-in-progress buckets-of-rust, each loved dearly by their owner. The term “hot rod” is generally thought to come from “Hot Roadster,” the souped up cars Prohibition-era distillers would use to run their product, so walking down the aisles of cars you’ll be greeted with flame paint jobs, wooden interiors, and a lot of horsepower.

Every year the location of the Street Rod Nationals would change: Columbus, OH; Knoxville, TN; St. Louis, MO. I cannot find an actual list of the varying locations it was held before it was permanently located in Louisville, KY in the late ’90s. I tried to piece a timeline together from the eBay listings of the commemorative steins given to participants each year, but the info is too spotty.

The journey to the car show was always marked by a little bit of resilience-building mechanical trouble, and in 1998 we didn’t have Google or sometimes even a local phone book to find help. We usually caravanned with my dad’s brother’s family, but when we didn’t roll with enough mechanical knowledge and hardware to solve any problem, it was a good thing my dad was a member of the Good Guys. The Good Guys were, among other things, an organization that published a phonebook-like directory of people all around the country who might be willing and able to help a stranded Hot Rodder. On long trips I would flip to the page that read “Manhattan, KS” and beam proudly to see my dad’s name, “Joseph Jones,” among the helpers.

After we’d braved the gauntlet of interstate travel and continental breakfast, we’d arrive at registration. Each car got you two adult and two youth tickets, represented by big bright pins you showed at the gates. We had one or two cars in our party and six or seven adults, which meant the beginning of the day was spent illicitly passing buttons through the fairground fences, ensuring we didn’t need to pay the extra admission.

A free-range kid at a car show had many options. Most of the time was spent walking up and down the aisles of colorful, shiny, sparkly, pinstriped hobby cars, all lovingly cared for by grinning gear heads ready to tell you the car’s whole history. At the beginning of the weekend my dad would always hand me a disposable camera with the goal of “finding all the pretty cars,” but I suspect there was a fringe benefit to getting the 8-year-old who’d been hopped up on Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew out of the camp for a few hours.

One of my favorite car show staples were the live pinstriping demos. Skilled artists would take thin brushes dipped in inky pigment and freehand designs onto bulbous fenders, their moves so deft and steady it made me hold my own breath. The car we brought to car shows — a ’39 Chevy Sedan — was powder coated with white primer and had cracks in the windows earned on the very first day they were installed. My dad was always dropping the motor, fixing the back end, or rebuilding the transmission. For the body it was primer to keep the rust away, and Bondo when the Kansas roads put rust there anyway. The car is always a work in progress, and thus, it has never gotten the paint and finishing it deserved. As a kid, that was the dream: to someday watch the ‘39 in one of those pinstriping booths, getting the final flourishes of a finished project.

The expo halls catered to everyone’s tastes, with fair food, a craft menagerie (known as “Women’s World”), swap meets, and every modification and upgrade for your car you could imagine. I can still remember my dad buying the seatbelts he retrofitted to keep his young family safe on our travels.

After the coolers had been drained and the motel checked out of, it was time for the long drive home. We would always get stuck on two-lane highways behind the slow-moving nemesis, the trailer car. To my dad, it was the utmost insult to bring a car to a car show on a trailer. It’s a car, it should be driven! As a kid with my ear pressed against the wheel well, road noise lulling me to sleep, I’d think that if we had a trailer car we might not have to call so many Good Guys on the way to the show. Now, as an adult, I get it.

I call my dad for our regular chat, and hear about how it’s too damn hot and humid down in the South where he lives, how everyone drives like a maniac, and how the neighborhood cat has adopted him. Then I hear about the ’39, a veritable member of our family. It’s still my dad’s daily driver, unless he’s dropping the back end or rebuilding its transmission. It still bears the gray lap-belts installed to keep a 60-pound 10-year-old safe, that 10-year-old now pushing 35. There are still no door handles, there have never been. My dad just never drilled and installed them. He preferred the button he had hidden below the driver’s door, chuckling that people couldn’t steal a car they couldn’t get open. He chips away at his list, while batting back the hands of time and rust. He talks about selling it, but we know he never will. It’s his Magnum Opus, and it’s painted in primer white.